FATHER AND SONS

Galerie Paris-Beijing is proud to present the world premier of Chinese filmmaker Wang Bing’s photographic work. Having achieved international renown with his first film, the epic West of the Tracks (2004), and fame with his historical fiction The Ditch (the surprise film at the Venice festival in 2010), Wang Bing does extreme cinema. He makes films of incredible length (up to 9 hours!), tackles radical subjects and creates images with a harsh aesthetic that approaches the cruel reality, but with honesty and gentleness, and even empathy.

Born in 1967 in Shaanxi, a province in central China, Wang Bing first studied photography in Shenyang before taking cinema classes in Beijing. Very recently, he has returned to his first passion: between 2013 and 2014, Wang Bing realized a series of photographs taken on the sites of two former full-length films, and also during the shooting of his latest film, Father and Sons.

Galerie Paris-Beijing had the pleasure of supporting the artist in this project and co- producing these new works, which will be exhibited in part at the Pompidou Center, where a retrospective of his cinematic work will take place from 14th April – 26th May.

As an extension of the event and exhibition at the Pompidou Center, Galerie Paris- Beijing is showing two new photographic series for the first time: The Man With No Name (2013) and Father and Sons (2014).

In the first series, Wang Bing has retraced the footsteps of the silent hero that he followed into the depths of the Chinese steppes in 2006 for a documentary on his daily life in the margins of society. For the second series, he filmed and photographed the miserable life of Cai, a stonemason, and his two sons in the desolate suburbs of a lost city in the mountains of Yunnan. The unreleased film Father and Sons will also be projected at the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

Wang Bing shows us a world and a humanity in ruins, the other side to the coin of China’s triumphal march towards material prosperity: “We must show the problems of contemporary China,” he says, “the hypocrisy of this system where economic growth obscures a material and spiritual impoverishment that affects millions of people.”